Today after school Ben, May and I met to talk about the website design. Our first thought was that the look and feel of the website itself should be very user oriented and easy to use. Right now for Sunday, our goal is to get a working website that does the basics. The end product is something that looks like a Yahoo mail interface, but that will take much more time.
A few weeks (days? months? decades?) ago, Mr Derbes, Baker Franke, and I met up at ninth period and discussed the basic outline of how the software should look. Be forewarned: this will get technical.
First of all, we need to perform the main task of a computer program: to process and organize data. To do this, Mr Franke proposes that we use a MySQL database as the foundation of our data storage. A database will allow us to interact easily and efficiently with the information contained therein, in this case, pancake recipes. This will serve as Ben's "music library." It will reside on "clubs," the server the school runs for...clubs.
We also need a way for our users to interact with the data. This is the user interface bit. Since this is a Web 2.0-style device we are building, Mr Franke has suggested we use PHP to read data out of the MySQL table and to generate web pages based on said data. This will enhance flexibility and ease of programming while allowing us to make some slick-looking pages.
Finally, we need a way to translate that information into something the robot team can use. How to do this will become clearer when the robot team figures out how their bit works, but until that time, as I have described, there is no dearth of other work to be completed.
I called Lil' Orbits Inc about the pancake machine and got a quote of $5,695 plus $80 shipping; if we were to place an order within the next two weeks, we can expect the machine to be here within three weeks afterwards. If we were to buy it from the manufacturer, our budget would be entirely overthrown.
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